Master of the maze

“You need to know when it’s time to go” …Sam Dastyari has been given a spot in the senate by the NSW ALP. Photo: Nick Moir

Like so many NSW Labor Party lunches, this one was at the Golden Century, a multi-storeyed Chinese restaurant in Sussex Street, Sydney, a few doors down from the ALP's NSW headquarters. It was February 23, 2010, a sweltering summer's day. Hunched over the table in a private room, chopsticks reaching for the salt and pepper squid, shredded beef and garlic prawns, were right-wing union barons Joe de Bruyn, Michael Williamson, Bernie Riordan, Tony Sheldon, Russ Collison and Derrick Belan. Also present were Matt Thistlethwaite, general secretary of the NSW branch of the ALP, and its assistant general secretary, Sam Dastyari.

It was an assemblage of union and political might rarely seen on such public display. Today, looking back at that lunch, one of those present describes it as a "handover". At the time, however, it was talked about as an "execution".

Dastyari has cut and run before he was exposed. If he’d hung around, he’d have to confront and defeat the union barons.

"Matt walked into that lunch as general secretary and walked out a senator," an ALP insider tells me. Dastyari was tapped to replace Thistlethwaite as NSW ALP general secretary, widely viewed as one of the most powerful political jobs in the country. Dastyari was just 27. He had been assistant general secretary for a mere eight weeks. Before that he had been just "the party organiser in short pants", as one insider puts it.

Family ties … Dastyari with his sister, Azadeh, last November. Photo: courtesy of Sam Dastyari

"We picked Sam because he was bright, smart, articulate," one of the union leaders involved tells me. "He was the only serious option, because we needed a known quantity."

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At the time, the legendary NSW Labor Right (which now likes to call itself "Centre Unity") was in disarray. Thistlethwaite had come from Unions NSW and had never worked at the ALP before he was appointed to run the party following the unexpected departure of Karl Bitar, who left to become ALP national secretary in Canberra. The inexperienced Thistlethwaite soon made serious enemies and, after only 18 months in the job, he had to be moved on.

All eyes now turned to his deputy, the exceptionally bright but untested Dastyari. It was no doubt reassuring that the previous month Dastyari had married Helen Barron, an economist he'd met while she was on the staff of former NSW ALP premier Morris Iemma, and the daughter of renowned ALP svengali Peter Barron. Barron could be expected to give sound advice to his young son-in-law, as would other party elders such as Unions NSW boss Mark Lennon and Barron's close friend Graham Richardson, who himself had been NSW ALP general secretary from 1976 to 1983.

Sam I am … Sam Dastyari with Julia Gillard in May this year. Photo: AAP

With Dastyari's undisputed intelligence and keen political brain, and the support systems being put in place for him, many people expected he would settle in and become one of the longest-serving and most influential general secretaries in the party's history. And early on, he positioned himself as a champion of much-needed reforms, promising to revive a moribund party. "The party has to reform to save itself," he said. His actions indicated he was the real deal.

He worked with Labor NSW opposition leader John Robertson and, later, PM Kevin Rudd on internal reforms which, he claims now, have given NSW Labor "the highest governance standards of any political party in the country". He advocates primary elections to select candidates, trialling the system during the Sydney lord mayoral contest last year, and argues to me that "the future of the Labor Party lies in mass membership participation".

This kind of talk won Dastyari the at-least grudging support of the party's Left faction, even from famously sceptical elders such as senator John Faulkner. "The entire tone Sam brought to the discussion has been very helpful," says one leading light in the Left. Mark Latham has praised "the Dastyari vision". But now, after just under 3 1/2 years in a job that predecessors like Richardson, Stephen Loosley and John Della Bosca did for around seven years, Dastyari is gone.

Dastyari's departure was a surprise and it was not immediately apparent why he decided to leave. "I want to stay in this job until at least 2019," he told Crikey in June 2011. "If you start trying to reform the party, you have to see it through to the end."

Pressure was certainly put on him to stay. "I think we're all saying to him in the Labor Party, 'We want a long-term general secretary', " Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr, a Dastyari mentor, said in June this year. "And by the way, there's more clout, more power, more prestige in being a long-term authoritative general secretary of the NSW ALP ... than being just another of those former party secretaries who ends up sitting in the senate."

But, like former party secretaries Richardson, Loosley, Thistlethwaite and Mark Arbib, that is exactly where Dastyari is going. He will fill the casual vacancy left by none other than Matt Thistlethwaite, who resigned from the senate on August 9 to stand for Peter Garrett's former Sydney seat of Kingsford-Smith. "You need to know when it's time to go," Dastyari tells me. "It's come time for me to move on." He stuck to that line when I reminded him of his earlier undertakings to see the reforms through. "Reform is not a one-man show, and nor should it be."

"He's cut and run before he was exposed," says a leading Left parliamentarian. "If he'd hung around, he'd have to confront and defeat the union barons." As it is, he leaves a party that "is owned lock, stock and barrel by the unions", to quote an ALP parliamentarian. "I'm a Laborist," says Dastyari, when asked whether union domination of the party should end. "You have to ask yourself, 'Are you a labour party or are you a social democratic party'? You don't want to throw out the voice of two million working Australians."

The party suffered its worst electoral defeat in its history at the 2011 NSW state election and is likely to lose the coming federal election. As well, two former state Labor government ministers are facing possible corruption charges and, even though Dastyari ensured they were expelled, the party is inescapably tarnished. Things are pretty bad but, says a former party administrator, "Things are worse than people think."

On the evening of Friday August 9, about 100 members of the NSW Labor Right gathered in the atrium beneath the ALP's Sussex Street headquarters, and unanimously endorsed Dastyari for the senate. His replacement as NSW ALP general secretary is Jamie Clements, 37, who has been assistant general secretary for the past few months. "Jamie will be more cautious about reform," says a key union leader. In accepting the job, Clements joked that he'd be back in a few years to ask for a senate seat.

Dastyari becomes a senator "without ever having faced a ballot in his life", says someone from his own faction. It didn't need a lunch at the Golden Century. "For all the talk of democratisation, Sam went to the unions, they signed off on it and the rank and file will be expected to endorse it."

Sahand Dastyari was four when he arrived in Australia in January 1988, just before Australia Day. Having just flown in from a freezing Iran, he was struck by the incredible heat. His sister Azadeh, four years older, was more impressed by the spectacular Bicentennial fireworks. Their parents, Naser and Elahe, were students who had campaigned for the removal of the authoritarian Shah of Iran as the country's leader, then found themselves confronting an even more repressive regime when Ayatollah Khomeini took over in 1979.

Naser's brother, Kamal, and his family had fled across the border into Turkey in 1982 and made their way to Australia as refugees. Six years later, his brother and his family joined them in Sydney under the family reunion program. After a short time in Blacktown, they moved further west to south Penrith, where for the first few years life was very tough. "We were really struggling," says Azadeh. Money was short; their father drove a taxi while their mother studied. "We were the only non-white kids in the area," she says, and they spoke no English at first. She recalls her brother at kindy talking in Farsi to another little kid who spoke back to him in Greek.

Their parents opened a Michel's Patisserie shop and worked such long hours that their children were often left to themselves: "Az basically brought me up," says Sam. "We'd spend every day and every evening together. Nobody had a bigger role in shaping me than her." The kids also helped their parents: eight-year-old Sam would "go to Coles and shop for the week," says Azadeh.

The family then moved to the tonier Hills district in Sydney's north-west and upgraded from the patisserie to a King of Knives store, where Sam often helped out. "We both worked insane hours," explains Azadeh. Sam still does. "I've got this crazy work ethic," he tells me. "It takes its toll on your family, it takes its toll on you."

In year 6 at John Purchase Public School in Cherrybrook, Dastyari ran for school captain. He got a team of spruikers to organise his numbers, especially the votes of kids in years 3 and 4. "I ran a campaign pledging we'd start selling soft drinks in the canteen," he says. He won "overwhelmingly". But the principal wasn't about to allow a kid to dictate what was sold in the canteen and vetoed the result. Dastyari was "very upset", Azadeh recalls.

He completed his schooling at Baulkham Hills High, a government selective school, in 2001. Despite missing a lot of school - "It was too boring for him," says his sister - Dastyari became vice-captain and achieved a mark of 99.75 in the HSC. School friend Payam Poursoltan, another Iranian who is now a dentist, describes him as "charismatically intelligent and a good-hearted person ... We both got into medicine. But although Sam thought about it, he decided to do law."

The 1999 referendum on the republic had attracted the young Dastyari into politics. That year, when he was 16, he joined the ALP and immediately became active, urging school friends to join. (By 2005 he was president of Young Labor.) Ultimately, however, Sam - as he'd begun calling himself - dropped out of his combined law/economics degree at Sydney University. "I got so caught up in the movement and student politics," he tells me. He transferred to Macquarie University and, after years of part-time study, was awarded an arts degree, majoring in politics, last year.

In February this year, Dastyari reached the view, based on the party's polling, that Labor's losses in NSW in this year's federal poll would be catastrophic if Julia Gillard remained as prime minister. Awkwardly, he had already proposed to Gillard that she spend a week in western Sydney in a last-ditch effort to shore up the party's position.

The "political restart", as Dastyari called it, went ahead - and it was a disaster. The staging was (deliberately?) inept. One set piece had the PM standing at a motorway exit, traffic signs behind her and the noise of passing trucks muffling her words. While Gillard delivered her campaign-style speech to open the western offensive at the University of Western Sydney on March 3, officials from Sussex Street were overheard openly disparaging her. "Flat speech," said one. "It'll be good when she's gone," said another.

Dastyari was frank with his union masters about his change in position and they - even those who stuck with Julia Gillard to the end - defend his defection. "It's the party secretary's responsibility to get us elected," one union boss told me. "He did not act dishonourably," another union secretary said.

"There was no treachery or backstabbing," Dastyari says. But though he spoke in general terms to Gillard about how dire the political situation was, he was not frank with her. He did not tell her he had switched his support to Kevin Rudd.

Gillard survived the March 21 non-challenge when Rudd failed to front up. "There are some who argue that he should've stood," Dastyari says. "I'm not one of them, because he didn't have the numbers in March." The numbers had to be found, in other words.

Publicly, Dastyari continued to deny his involvement. "Rubbish," he tweeted in response to an ABC report that he was in Parliament House working for Rudd the day before Gillard was ousted on June 26. In our interview, he disputes that he "delivered" the leadership to Kevin Rudd: "The idea that I was somehow instrumental is wrong." Few of his colleagues would agree with this assessment. "He was the architect in galvanising the Right against Julia," says a party insider.

And Rudd returned the favour. Despite liking to position himself as a "factional loner", Rudd has rewarded the people who helped him. All but five of the 16 non-retiring members of the NSW Right have positions in his government - more than any other faction.

Seldom has the power of the NSW ALP general secretary been more apparent than in February 2012, when, following the sudden resignation of Mark Arbib from the senate, Dastyari was able to lure Bob Carr out of political retirement with the offer of not just a senate seat (no election required), but also the juicy plum of the foreign affairs portfolio. It must have been immensely satisfying for the young man who'd joined Carr's staff the day before Carr stepped down as NSW premier in 2005 to now play kingmaker.

So is he upset by Carr's recent depiction of the current flood of asylum seekers from places such as Iran as "economic migrants"? I put it to Dastyari that he would not be here today had Carr's views been policy back in 1988. He rejects the proposition. "Bob was talking about people coming by boat as economic migrants. We came through a different migration program."

Dastyari acknowledges the rest of his family is "further left than me". Sister Azadeh lectures in refugee law at Monash University, and frequently writes opinion pieces criticising government policy. His mother, Elahe, has written an unpublished novel about an Iranian refugee who comes to Australia by boat.

"My sister believes in onshore processing," Dastyari tells me. "I hold the view that the danger with onshore processing is you're creating a system where too many people risk their lives and die at sea." He and his sister have reached an understanding whereby they respect each other's views while disagreeing with them. The question upsets him, though: "This isn't an easy policy area when you've got an emotional attachment, like I do."

When I meet Dastyari, ALP headquarters are largely deserted because the party has decamped to Parramatta for the election campaign - although at night, Dastyari tells me, the place operates as a call centre with volunteers using every available telephone to contact voters. His old office is a spartan room with black leather couches and a desk clear of papers. Dastyari is effectively no longer NSW ALP general secretary. He now runs field operations in the national campaign office in Melbourne and Jamie Clements has taken over. "I can feel the power dripping out of me," he jokes.

He is known for his sense of humour. He loves stand-up comedy, he once ordered a Virgin Mary during a meeting with Cardinal George Pell and he called his cats Lenin, Trotsky and Chairman Mao. But, he tells me, "we've had a few deaths, so now it's Chairman Mao and Margaret Thatcher". He thinks Chairman Mao was responsible for the deaths of the other two cats.

Dastyari is short in stature, with dark hair and a trim, fit body that shows off his good suits to advantage. Today, the suit is a well-cut dark grey over a blue shirt. No tie. He is friendly and affable and, I can tell, he is trying hard to give me his undivided attention, checking his phone only four or five times during our interview. He describes himself as having "a relentless energy".

Others are less charitable about his hyper-activity, his trademark lack of attention, his notorious failure to return phone calls - even from members of parliament - and his seeming inability to concentrate on just one thing at a time. He is "like a meal where the dishes are taken away too early," says another party official.

According to one of his close friends, there are three things you can say about Sam Dastyari: "He's never worked outside the ALP, he's never lost and he's never had bad media."

Dastyari inherited from his parents a strong belief in social justice. "He knows what it's like to be a poor person struggling in this society," says his sister. "And his response is that you have to work to keep the conservatives out. The working class for him is not a slogan, it's a lived experience."

Recently, he, wife Helen and their two-year-old daughter, Hannah, moved into a $1.36 million, four-bedroom house in Russell Lea, an inner-west Sydney suburb. Another daughter is due in late September.

Some of those who attended the right-wing faction meeting that endorsed him for the senate were surprised to hear him talk of an interest in policy, but Dastyari has been at work on a book that will elaborate his views of the Australian experience. Like his best political friend, Australian Workers' Union national secretary Paul Howes - they talk at least five times a day, says Howes - and his factional ally, Treasurer Chris Bowen, Dastyari has been signed up by Melbourne University Publishing; his book will be published early next year.

"We're getting healthier, we're getting wealthier, we're living for longer, but everybody's under an incredible amount of pressure," he says, describing what the book will address. "I think the future of the Australian centre-left is going to be about shifting this debate from being solely about the cost of living to being about quality of life. That's the next big ideological challenge for the movement."

As he prepares to take his seat in the senate, the first Iranian to sit in an Australian parliament, Dastyari says, "In politics, you'd rather them say, 'We'd rather see you stay than go', than, 'We want you out'. " He's flattered but unmoved. What he now calls "the endless process" of reform will be up to others to champion.

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